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Friday, September 7, 2018

Five Minute Reedmaker: Tone

OMG the Five Minute Reedmaker is Back!

Here’s what I’ve been up to: I have a few videos ready to drop - I think I’ll put them out on Fridays. I don’t know if Season Two can take us all the way to the end of the year, as Season One did before. There may not be that many more topics to consider. But I love you guys so I’ll try.

The playlist is still up on Youtube, but I’ve ALSO curated Season One onto my own website. I never can figure out the best way to organize things in a Youtube playlist and this way you can see all of the videos really easily on one screen. I think this will be helpful. Perhaps you will let me know if you like it.

Now onto today's video...

I say this all the time - DON’T choose a reed for its tone. DON’T keep scraping for sound, scrape for function. Get the reed to work. The sound will follow.

But the sound is not UNIMPORTANT, right?

Tyler wrote to me: Your videos are great! (Thank you, Tyler! ) Do you think you could do one on tone and how scraping different sections of the reed affects it? I know it's a loaded, complicated topic, but anything you give will help a lot.﻿

This is a loaded topic, first of all because a good tone means different things to different people, and secondly because different people might play the same reed differently. The shape of your mouth is a factor, how far in on the reed you like to have your lips be, how mouthy you choose to be on the reed. But I think we can agree on some elements that go into a good tone - core, stability, and flexibility. Focus. Sweetness. Diffuseness.

That’s a lot of elements, actually. As I started writing them down I started thinking of more and more. And this is why the question is complicated.

But in this video I look at the most COMMON cause of a bad tone and work through two manifestations of it.